Fancy your car sounding like a TIE Fighter, or the Millennium Falcon, a speeder bike or maybe a landspeeder? It might not be as fanciful a request as you think as Yamaha are working on a system to give electric cars a more unique and driver friendly soundscape, including audio from the GFFA.
Engineers at the division, called alive, believe sound is crucial for a driver to get a sense of control and speed. Many people prefer the classic vroom-vroom noise but the sky’s the limit, according to Hideo Fujita, who’s part of the team developing the soundscapes at Yamaha. “Even one that sounds like Star Wars” is possible, he said.
Yamaha is also getting some help from its musical stablemate. It sourced sound chips from the piano maker and worked on tests that treated a car shell more like a musical instrument, looking into what sort of tones reverberate best when a driver stomps on the pedal.
Yamaha hasn’t announced when it will start selling the soundscapes but it plans to start small, selling them first to drivers of luxury electric sports cars. One day, as more people switch to EVs, the sound devices could become a regular feature in EVs, Yamaha engineer Sumito Tanaka predicts.
